Incentive Mechanisms and Impacts of Negotiation Power and Information Availability in Multi-Relay Cooperative Wireless Networks

Cooperative relaying is highly affected by the way that the source and relays are incentivized. However, the existing studies have not paid enough attention to the impacts of negotiation power and information availability of the players on the network performance. In this paper, two incentive mechanisms for cooperative relaying are first proposed to explore the influence of negotiation power, wherein the source holds either strong or weak negotiation power. In these two cases, the source posts take-it-or-leave-it offers for the relays and has to negotiate possible deals with the relays, respectively. The relay selection rules and the optimal amounts of relaying service and rewards are derived for each mechanism, respectively. Another two incentive mechanisms are also proposed to explore the influence of information availability, wherein the source has either weakly or strongly incomplete information about the relays. In these two cases, the source acquires the number of relays belonging to each type and the probability of each relay belonging to a certain type, respectively. The relay selection rules and the optimal contract offers are derived for the two mechanisms, respectively. The numerical results are provided to verify the theoretical analyses and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanisms.